"If those civilizations are out there – and we don't know that
they are – those that inhabit star systems that lie close to the plane
of the Earth's orbit around the sun will be the most motivated to send
communications signals toward Earth, because those civilizations will
surely have detected our annual transit across the face of the sun,
telling them that Earth lies in a habitable zone, where liquid water is
stable," says Richard Conn Henry, of Johns Hopkins University. "Through
spectroscopic analysis of our atmosphere, they will know that Earth
likely bears life. Knowing where to look tremendously reduces the
amount of radio telescope time we will need to conduct the search.”

Sick of waiting for alien life to plummet Earthward from the stars, the European Space Agency recently decided to do it themselves. They strapped some life-bearing rocks to an unmanned Russian spacecraft and crash-landed it in a remote area of Khazakstan, possibly because they've never read anything by Michael Crichton. All they need now is a maverick army sergeant, an improbably photogenic female scientist and a gigantic special effects budget for the bullet-proof monster.

Frank Drake, the author of the famed "Drake Equation," which estimates the possible
range of intelligent civilizations in our home Milky Way Galaxy,
which contains about 400 billion stars will be giving a talk on Thursday, March 31, at the Alaska's Barrow Arctic Science Consortium on "new habitable planets in space, and our new searches for the inhabitants."

The SETI project – Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – has been in existence in one form or another for several decades, dating back to Frank Drake’s first SETI experiment named Project Ozma. SETI is basically the search for intelligence through listening for radio waves of another civilization. For Drake back in the 1960’s, this was no doubt the sign of a technologically prevalent society, and the smartest means to search for life.